Quality Control and Peer Review
IJSE uses double-blind review approach, which means that both the reviewer/s and author/s identities are hidden from the reviewers, and vice versa, during the review process. To enable this, author/s need to guarantee that their manuscripts are prepared in a way that does not give away their identity. Articles published in International Journal of Scholars in Education undergo double blind peer review. Two reviewers read each manuscript, and accept or reject based on their expertise and assessment of the manuscript. Editors provide the review contents to authors, ensure the feedback is incorporated for accepted articles, and upload the revised versions. A publication checklist with formatting requirements is completed for each article.

Reviewer Roles and Responsibilities
International Journal of Scholars in Education (IJSE) recognizes the importance of peer reviewing process. Accordingly IJSE believes that peer review is the major instrument by which the quality of research is judged. Peer reviews assist the editor in making editorial decisions and through the editorial communications with the author may also assist the author in improving the paper.

Reviewer responsibilities to authors
• Providing written, unbiased, constructive feedback in a timely manner on the scholarly merits and the scientific value of the work, together with the documented basis for the reviewer’s opinion
• Indicating whether the writing is clear, concise, and relevant and rating the work’s composition, scientific accuracy, originality, and interest to the journal’s readers
• Avoiding personal comments or criticism
• Maintaining the confidentiality of the review process: not sharing, discussing with third parties, or disclosing information from the reviewed paper

Reviewer responsibilities to editors
• Notifying the editor immediately if unable to review in a timely manner and, if able, providing the names of alternative reviewers
• Alerting the editor about any potential personal, financial or perceived conflict of interest and declining to review when a conflict exists
• Complying with the editor’s written instructions on the journal’s expectations for the scope, content, and quality of the review
• Providing a thoughtful, fair, constructive, and informative critique of the submitted work, which may include supplementary material provided to the journal by the author
• Determining scientific merit, originality, and scope of the work; indicating ways to improve it; and, if requested, recommending acceptance or rejection using whatever rating scale the editor deems most useful
• Noting any ethical concerns, such as any violation of accepted norms of ethical treatment of animal or human subjects or substantial similarity between the reviewed manuscript and any published paper or any manuscript concurrently submitted to another journal that may be known to the reviewer
• Refraining from direct author contact

Citation of Sources

• Reviewers should identify relevant published works cited by the authors. Any statement that an observation, derivation, or argument had been previously reported should be accompanied by the relevant citation.

Reviewer responsibilities to readers
• Ensuring that the methods and analysis are adequately detailed to allow the reader to judge the scientific merit of the study design and be able to replicate the study
• Ensuring that the article cites all relevant work by other scientists

Disclosure and conflict of interest
• A conflict of interest may exist when a reviewer has a financial or personal interest that could affect his/her professional judgement on the manuscript. Potential reviewers who conduct their own research works which are conflicting or competing with the authors will not be appointed.

• A potential reviewer must disclose any potential financial/personal conflict (if any) to the editors before agreeing to review a manuscript.

• A reviewer may opt to refuse to review any submission due to a conflict of interest or insufficient knowledge.

Reviewers can state the following four decisions for the submitted manuscript:
-Accept for Publication
-Revisions required (Accept with minor revisions, revisions are checked by the reviewers and editors)
-Resubmit for Review (Major revisions: Reviewed for the second round by the reviewers and editiors)
-Reject (It is not recommended for publishing)


How to anonymize your manuscript for double-blind peer review:
• Do not include author name/s or affiliation/s anywhere in the manuscript, or in any Supplementary Information files (or in any file names).
• Provide a separate title page giving all the author name/s and affiliation/s.
• Do not include an Acknowledgments section containing author name/s in the manuscript. The Acknowledgments section can be added to the manuscript after the review process.
• Do not include work in the reference list that has not yet been accepted for publication.
• Avoid using terminology that might reveal your identity (e.g. avoid phrases such as “we have previously shown [reference]”) while referring to your own work in the paper. If it is a necessity you can cover it with the word Author/s both in-text citation and references.